of us, not for us to go and learn of them. It is for us to determine the laws of our language and to fix its usage, not for them ; for nothing they do or can do will endure. They and their works are of this world, and will pass away with the fashion thereof. The promise is not to them, and time, as he passes on, levels their proudest monuments to the dust, and sweeps out every vestige of their existence, and draws the black pall of forgetfulness over all they did, all they had, and all they were.

But we have wandered from our purpose. Living as we do in the midst of this boasting and boasted Anglo-Saxon world, witnessing the lofty pretensions of the heretical and unbelieving, — beholding them filling the places of trust, honor, and profit, multiplying schools, praising education, and professing themselves wise beyond all precedent, we are apt to regard them as somebody, and, with that modesty and self-distrust our religion inculcates, to suppose that we may profitably defer to them in all matters where our faith does not positively forbid us. Our writers seek to catch the Protestant manner, and study to set their Catholic gem in a Protestant case. We have wished to protest against this, and to urge upon our brethren the folly of such a procedure. We love our Protestant brethren, and daily pray for their conversion ; but we cannot take lessons from them on any subject whatever. Wherever we see the stamp of Protestantism, we see something to be abhorred; for even the truth in a Protestant garb seldom fails

a to have the effect of falsehood.

We esteem highly Butler's Lives of the Saints. It is a work of vast erudition; but we always feel, when reading it, that the excellent author would have made it still more valuable, if he had written it solely for the edification of Catholics, and not with an eye to Protestant criticisms and cavils. We wish he had written less as the critic, and more as the pious believer. He strips his subject too bare, prunes away its natural branches, and divests it of its ever-green foliage. When we read the Lives of the Saints, we wish to do it always with the wonder and reverence which Plato calls the beginning of wisdom ; we would read them, not for historical criticisin, nor in a doubtful, hesitating spirit, determined to reject every miracle for which there is not evidence to satisfy the court of Rome in a process for canonization ; but as spiritual exercises, in open faith and ardent love, remembering that no heart of man can conceive how much our good Father loves even the least of his saints, and that there is nothing he is not ready and willing

a

to do for any of us, if we are only simple and humble, and will not claim the glory for ourselves. The more miracles are crowded into the Life of a Saint, the better we like it ; and we suffer ourselves to be edified, without stopping at each one to ask, Can it be proved that this miracle was really wrought ? Nevertheless, Butler's Lives of the Saints is one of the noblest monuments reared in this English tongue to the glory of God in his Church, and we again thank the worthy Sulpicians of Baltimore for placing it within the reach of even the poor of our community. Happy will it be for the people who make it their daily reading.

We know not the author or the translator of the Life of St. Stanislaus Kotska, now before us, and which is one of the sweetest little books that has as yet issued from the Metropolitan press. It is a model in its way, - simple, chaste, full of tender piety, of charity, and unction. The author has written with a deep sympathy with his subject, under the gentle and holy influence of the sweet youth and mature saint whose brief but glorious life he records. The translator has caught the spirit of his author, and the English language under his plastic piety_loses its stubbornness, and becomes pliable and Catholic. The work is just one of those little works we love. We cannot have too many such works ; nor can they be too widely circulated, or too often read.

We cannot trust ourselves to speak of the Saint himself. The little book before us says all that needs to be said, and we hope before this it is in the hands of all our readers. Our Catholic life begins at too recent a date, and we have been too little inured to Catholic discipline, to be able to speak with any edification of the saints of God. It is for us to say, “ St. Stanislaus Kotska, pray for us,” rather than to attempt either a brief

" sketch of his life, or a panegyric on his virtues. As the patron of novices we invoke him, for, if we are no novice in the technical sense, we are in every other. He seems to have been sent to us to show us how near heaven we may live even while in the flesh. A lovelier flower of divine charity has rarely bloomed in an earthly garden, and we may well term him “ the Beloved of Mary.” It is not easy to meditate on his short but heroic life without having our affections weaned from the earth, without becoming able to trample whatever pertains to this world under our feet, without rising superior to all that is visible and temporal, and longing to enlist in the noble army of Jesus our King, and to aspire to win the crown of life, which God with

a

mortal eyes.

his own hand will confer one day on them that love him and persevere to the end.

Heaven lies much nearer to us than we, busied and engrossed with the things of time and sense, permit ourselves to believe. St. Stanislaus seems to have all but entered upon the life of the blessed, even while he lived only by promise. And then, if the promise lifts us so far above all the reality we know or can conceive, what must be its fulfilment, the reward itself ? Truly, eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive. Behold with what love the Father hath loved us! It hath not yet appeared what we shall be, but when he shall appear, we know we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

We shall see him as he is. The ever-blessed Virgin, the glorious Queen of Heaven, has more than once appeared to

He to whom she has appeared, though with her resplendent beauty veiled, and her glory tempered to his feeble vision, has yet been filled with rapturous delight, and felt that he could ask no more than to be permitted to behold her sweet loveliness and listen to the music of her voice. Yet she is but a creature, an humble mortal raised for her humility by divine grace to the rank in heaven highest below the Everadorable Trinity. All-resplendent as she is by divine grace, her beauty and loveliness are but the hidings of the beauty and loveliness of Him who hath exalted her. If she so fill the soul, if even her presence can be so rich a reward, if even to have seen her but once has carried the soul for ever away from itself, and even by its recollection made the cold and dusty earth a blissful paradise, what must it be to be permitted to behold our God himself, not through a glass darkly, not once for a brief moment, but as he is, and to dwell for ever in his presence ! Is it strange that this young saint, to whom Mary had appeared and spoken, should have longed to be with her ? Is it strange that his desire to be with her should have consumed his mortal frame, when to be with her was to be with God, to behold Him who hath loved us and redeemed us, and to behold him as he is in himself ? How welcome the permission to leave this world, with the sweet assurance of meeting our Father, and entering into the joy of our Lord! What has death, called

, the king of terrors, then, to frighten the soul? Shall not the soul leap with joy to end her wanderings, to return from her exile, to reach her home, her Father's house, and receive his hearty welcome and warm embrace ? NEW SERIES. VOL. 1. NO. IV.

68

What is this world to one who looks forward to this glorious reünion at home, in his Father's house? How poor and mean its honors and rewards ! how unworthy of a thought its sorrows, its trials and afflictions! Yet to this

may

ali look forward, if we will ; to this home of our Father we may all return, if we will; we can gain heaven by simply willing it. What fools, then, we are ! Here we are, wedded to this world, sighing and struggling for its tinsel honors, mad with rage if some are more successful than we, filled with jealousy, or pining with envy. Yet there lies heaven with all its resplendent beauty, with all its eternal glories, with all its inconceivable beatitude, to be had for the simple willing ! Surely, the saints are the only wise. The rest of us are fools, fools sunk to such a depth of folly that we cannot conceive it. Yet we call ourselves wise, and count it a sacrifice to give ourselves to God, to forego the earth and live for heaven! Parents feel that their sons and daughters throw themselves away, when they die to the world that they may live to God; and think that they have well settled them, if they have succeeded in securing them honorable worldly establishments. O, the madness of men is beyond conception !

Nay, the religion which promises and secures us heaven, which crowns us with the Supreme Good, is not only neglected, made to give way to the world, but it is actually hated, and men are mad against it, conspire to overthrow it, and feel that they have gained a noble victory, if they have withdrawn some poor child from its sweet and holy influence. There is hardly a city in the Union in which there are not benevolent ladies banded together, practising self-denial, and giving alms enough even to gain heaven, if accompanied by faith and charity, who make it a business to find out poor children, and with sweetmeats, and fine dresses, and flattering words, entice them from religion, lure them from God, to be brought up in hatred of Him who redeemed them, of the Spiritual Mother who bore them, and to burn eternally in the fire prepared for the devil and his angels. And these charming ladies persuade themselves that they are doing a deed of charity, that they are serving God, that he will love and reward them for it, — poor

deluded creatures, who are nothing more or less than procuresses to the devil. How strange! What terrible infatuation ! As if it were not ten thousand million times better that our children should starve to death before our eyes than that they should be brought up Protestants ? This hatred of Christianity, this war against the Church, the sweet solace of men here,

and the medium of heaven hereafter, is the strangest and most unaccountable madness. It is a thing hardly conceivable, much less believable, yet here it is before our eyes; and these people, who do their best to destroy themselves and all mankind, really imagine that they are wise and good people, the salt of the earth, the reformers of God's Church, and they affect to look down with pity and contempt on the poor Christian who repeats his Credo, Pater-noster, Ave, and Confiteor.

There is nothing better fitted to humble the pride of man, to make him see his own blindness and malice, than this hostility so widely manifested against the Immaculate Spouse of God. It shows us what man is, when he turns his back upon truth, and is abandoned to himself. He is then at war with all nature, at war with heaven, at war with himself, and revels in the delight of plucking out his own eyes, tearing out his own bowels, and rending his own heartstrings. How grateful should we be to Almighty God, who through his great mercy has retained us in his Church, or brought us within his "closed garden"! Never can we be sufficiently thankful for the blessing we enjoy. Never can we sufficiently deplore the condition of those without, or with sufficient earnestness pray for their enlightenment. We, if left to ourselves, would be as they; like them, we should blaspheme God, and deride his character, and destroy our own souls. St. Stanislaus Kotska, pray for us, that we may persevere; and give thanks for us, that we have been enabled to see and know the truth, and to hope one day to be permitted to join thee in heaven, to behold Mary whom thou didst so love, and God who has crowned her with his grace Queen of Heaven. Beseech, also, the glorious Queen, our sweet Mother, to pray for the conversion of these revilers of her Divine Son, that heresy and infidelity may cease from our land, and the Church here be universal, and our whole population be her faithful, zealous, obedient children.

But we have introduced this Life of St. Stanislaus Kotska to our readers, not only to recommend it to their attention, but to suggest anew to those of our friends who are ambitious of producing an American Catholic literature, that, instead of aiming at the production of original works, they would do more credit to themselves and more service to religion, if they would confine themselves to translations, and especially to translations of the lives of particular saints. Original works written by English or American Catholics may be desired, but, unhappily, we can at present produce few such that will not be more Protestant in tone, temper, and influence, than Catholic.